War in Worcester

Youth and the Apartheid State

Pamela Reynolds

War in Worcester explores the experiences of the young in taking a stand against the apartheid regime in the 1980s at the height of the struggle for freedom. It combines an analysis of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission's process and findings with a close ethnographic study in a small town. Issues including tactics, pain, betrayal and ethics are examined from the point of view of young activists and the forms of documentation of conflict used by the Commission are critiqued.

War in Worcester

Youth and the Apartheid State

Pamela Reynolds

Description

The South African government gave no quarter to young people who joined the struggle against the apartheid state; indeed, it targeted them. Security forces meted out cruel treatment to youth who rebelled, incarcerated even the very young under dreadful conditions, and used torture frequently, sometimes over long periods of time. Little is known, however, from the perspective of young fighters themselves about the efforts they made to sustain the momentum of struggle, how that affected and was affected by their other social bonds, and what they achieved in terms of growth and paid in terms of harm. War in Worcester combines a study of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC)'s findings on the stand taken by South African youth with extended fieldwork undertaken with fourteen young men who, starting in their schooldays, were involved in the struggle in a small town in the Western Cape. Filling a gap in the ethnographic analysis of the role of youth in armed conflict, the book describes, from the perspective of the young fighters themselves, the tactics that young local leaders used and how the state retaliated, young peoples' experiences of pain and loss, the effect on fighters of the extensive use of informers by the state as a weapon of war, and the search for an ethic of survival.

The testimony of these young fighters reveals some limitations of the processes used by the TRC in its search to document the truth. War in Worcester problematizes the use of the term "victim" for the political engagement of young people and calls for attention to patterns of documenting the past and thus to the nature of the archive in recording the character of political forces and the uses of violence. It encourages a fresh analysis of the kinds of revolt being enacted by the young elsewhere in the world, such as North Africa and the Middle East.

War in Worcester

Youth and the Apartheid State

Pamela Reynolds

Author Information

PAMELA REYNOLDS is Professor Emerita, Johns Hopkins University, and Honorary Professor, University of Cape Town. Her books include Growing Up in a Divided Society: The Contexts of Childhood in South Africa, Childhood in Crossroads: Cognition and Society in South Africa, Dance Civet Cat: Child Labour in the Zambezi Valley, and Traditional Healers and Childhood in Zimbabwe.

War in Worcester

Youth and the Apartheid State

Pamela Reynolds

Reviews and Awards

"Throughout the text there is a tone of concern and care toward the participants, the young men who courageously took on the horrors of the apartheid state."-DON FOSTER, University of Cape Town

"'War in Worcester' presents the record of struggle in a small town and a description of relationships among young men who examine their experiences of activism retrospectively and microscopically." -African Studies Review

"Reynolds is arguably the most influential writer on youth and political activism today, and she has written a book that does an enormous amount of work as an archival resource. . ." -Journal of Southern African Studies